Drop (17 page)

‘They are?’

‘Yup,’ he confirmed. I smiled and nodded my approval.

‘You want to know why?’ Because you sold the rest of your wardrobe to pack your pipe.

‘Why?’ I asked.

‘You know.’

‘No.’ Yes. Because you’re on crack, and this is your new uniform.

‘Cindy,’ Clive said, lowering his tone but enunciating every syllable and looking over in her direction of the room, as if she could see his lips moving through the cubicle walls.

‘You did that?’

‘All night, brother,’ Clive laughed. ‘That was me.’

‘Damn.’

‘Let me tell you, that’s a lot of woman too. I climbed that mountain.’ Clive went to slap my hand and I let him even though I thought he was going to get Cindy juices on me. Between my eyes and his smiling image I saw a picture of Cindy’s inhumanely large pecan butt, naked and aimed towards the moon. Clive would be tense and gritting, banging away from behind like a chimp in a nature film as she snacked on pork rinds and watched
Martin
on the black-and-white on the other side of the cluttered room. Children would be playing too loud in the hall and Cindy would yell at them to calm down or she would kill them, and Clive wouldn’t notice any of it; his only concern in the world would be keeping his rhythm and controlling his load.

Cindy walked by a few minutes later, and when she passed she was giving an honest smile. For that moment I knew I could love her, that I could lay naked on a bed cupped in her arms, listening to her hum. She was wearing a new blouse today, a blue one; after three months I knew her whole wardrobe. Next to me Clive smiled big again and held up a plastic container of food the size of a shoebox.

‘And that bitch can cook, too,’ he added.

Philly.

Outcall

‘Come on, we’ll go down the Art Museum. It’s Sunday; it’s free till one.’

Nope.

‘Then we’ll swing down to Penn’s Landing. They’re having music today, this afternoon.’

I shrugged that away from me.

‘Then what? It’s a pretty day and you’re in a rut. You should really get out of the house.’

Why the hell should I do some dumb shit like that? America is TV and I’m sitting right in front of the damn thing already. Nothing exists that isn’t held within its cathode eye. Like Philly could offer anything to distract from its brilliance. Channel to channel click-clicking.

‘Aren’t you going to stop on anything?’ Why stop – 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26 – when the next image might be better and yet no sight is worth settling on? When the chance to forget your self, your guilt, your pain, lies just one button away?

‘Al, you know what we need on TV?’

‘What?’ she asked me.

‘More obese black matriarchs.’

‘Chris, why don’t you go for a walk?’

‘You just never see them on TV, do you? I mean, in real life we’re surrounded by them, these rotund sassy black mamas who break everything down to a wisecrack and a baked-potato hand on a turkey-loaf hip. How come there aren’t any of them on TV? They should have a sitcom with one. That’s a novel idea – they should have a sitcom centered around a loud, asexual negress, she could yell at her family every week, roll her eyes, you know how they do.’

‘Sure.’

‘Don’t laugh, it’s true – there hasn’t been a good chocolate mammy on TV since
Tom and Jerry
, and then they just showed her feet.’

‘Are you trying to piss me off? You know, you can go home. It’s not raining any more.’

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that. Not the woman thing. I was just telling funnies. It’s not just mammies, what about the coons? How are all the spades going to support themselves? Used to be when a brother could bug his eyes out a bit that was worth something. How about this – check this out – I got a brilliant idea: why not put a coon in a fish-out-of-water comedy? Like this: take a jigaboo and put him on a set surrounded by literate white people not hip to his negro ways. He could jump around like a confused monkey for a bit, then they could all come to some mutual understanding. How about, for example: me. I could be that coon, fair lady. That could be my new job. Fuck advertising. Maybe that’s how I’ll get out of here.’ I turned the TV off. I wanted to throw the remote against the wall, watch the black plastic crack and see the batteries roll across the floor. It wasn’t my remote to throw, or even my wall, so I just sat there, hoping maybe Alex would wrap her arms around my neck, explain away my suffering and tell me how everything was going to turn out fine. Instead, after silence retook the room, she walked over to the window and adjusted a tear in the screen.

‘So you’ve just given up then. You’re not going to let me help,’ Alex said.

‘I wish I could tell you what to help with.’

‘You get any work done yet, Chris? Any progress on your portfolio? Any movement towards anything that’s going to get you out of this place you’re in?’

‘No. I can’t think.’

‘Well, when you going to start thinking? I talked to Saul, the guy who works for the tourist bureau. You could get on him about doing some work.’

‘Alex, I can’t.’ I can’t even explain myself. All day I think about getting out of here, and then, by the time I get off, I’m starving because I can’t afford to buy a big lunch. Then once I get the food in me, all I can do is lie down. All I’m good for is sleeping. When I get up, it’s time for work again.

This morning was to be different. Mrs Hutton was sending us out into the community to sign people up for assistance. Me and Cindy were to be the ambassadors. Cindy was chosen because she was fast and she wouldn’t take shit from anyone. I was chosen because Mrs Hutton considered my presence generally disruptive and she needed the break. ‘The only reason you ain’t been fired is ‘cause you sound like white folks on the phone’ was how Cindy put it. So we had two days going around the ghetto in a mobile unit seeing what the folks we talked to on the phone really looked like. Like we couldn’t just look around the office.

Eight
A.M
. was me standing in front of the electric company building with my too-light jacket on, my hands in my pants trying to steal heat from my balls. Cindy stood next to me, bobbing up and down holding herself to fight the last of the spring cold. When she pulled out her cigarettes I asked for one. She said, ‘A quarter.’ All my pockets had was three nickels and ten pennies, which I counted out in front of her.

‘Don’t you have a dime?’

‘Nope.’ I pushed my change closer to her.

‘I don’t want your dirty-ass pennies,’ Cindy said, but she gave me a cigarette anyway, taking the nickels from my palm. I sucked on that thing hard, hoping I could get cancer before noon, cut short my tour of the land I was trapped in. Stealing its opportunity to gloat.

A white motorhome with the blue company logo stretched along its sides stopped in front of the building. Inside there was a miniature office, and we seated ourselves behind the desks as it drove on. I’d never been in one before, but when I was a kid my favorite show was an adventure about a group of scientists who drove an RV around the ruins of the post-Apocalypse. It was easy to remember as we drove through the post-industrial ruins of Grays Ferry, South Philadelphia. Redbrick tract housing with small, trash-laden yards, streets lined with large American cars in need of paint or death, telephone wires that bore sneakers like strange fruit on poplar trees. Too little space for too many things. White people who didn’t look like any white people on TV or in magazines, broken teeth and hair cut jagged and crude, too-bright clothes made of materials nature never intended. White people as far from what they were supposed to be as fact from story. I’d heard about this place all the time growing up but had never been because there was no reason to go to someone else’s ghetto.

Our driver’s face was red and covered with wrinkles, redundant and overlapping like the lines in an etching. He looked like the people outside. His name was Bill and he offered us donuts from a white bag on the dashboard. They were all powdered and small, and after I ate a couple the sugar clumped around my tongue. Bill stopped driving when we arrived at a parking lot of broken concrete and faded parking lines, pulling up to a small row of shops at the back of the lot.

‘I’m going to call in, tell them we’re here.’ When the door closed behind him Cindy expelled air like Houdini coming out of the water trap.

‘I don’t believe this shit!’

‘What’s your problem?’ I asked.

‘Grays Ferry? I didn’t know they wanted us to come down here. That bitch Hutton, she didn’t say nothing. Nothing.’

‘Where’d you think we were going? Society Hill?’

‘This is where that kid got killed.’

‘What kid?’

‘That kid, last summer. This is where those white people shot him.’

‘Why’d he get shot?’ I started lifting the blinds on the window, looking for bad people.

‘Are you sure you’re black? There was stuff about the fighting down here the whole summer. This is where the mayor came down. This is where Farrakhan was going to hold the rally.’

‘Word?’

‘Where the hell were you?’

‘I was out of the country.’

‘Where?’

‘Out of the country.’

‘You was upstate?’ Cindy asked.

‘No!’ I yelled. Cindy bust out laughing, her eyes growing wide as her head pulled back and her finger pointed me out to no one.

‘Nigger, you was upstate, you was on lock-down, don’t even lie.’

Bill came in and drove us towards the front of the parking lot by the street, next to the McDonald’s. We opened up the main door on the side of the vehicle, sat behind the desks, and waited for people to show up. It wasn’t even nine yet. Cold air came through the screen, carrying the smell of fried pork and melting cheese. Cindy started talking about how hungry she was and got Bill to go get food for her. If ten dirty pennies would have bought anything I would have gotten something, too. My paycheck was two days’ coming. ‘You want some of mine?’ Bill asked, and I said no. I couldn’t play myself, begging from a white dude, but I kept looking at Cindy’s food sitting next to me as it disappeared in a quick numb moment while she read a romance novel.

When she was done, Cindy shoved everything back in her bag, crushed it into a ball, and threw it in the trash on her way to the bathroom. When its door closed, I pulled her rubbish from the bin and took out her sandwich paper. Orange hunks of cheese sticking to the paper like melted plastic that I ripped off with my teeth. Buttered muffin crumbs I collected, balling them together in my fingertips into one caked salty mass.

The first people started coming an hour later. They poked their heads in and when they saw us sitting there they looked to Bill, who motioned back to them that it was okay to go to us. They were polite, though they often didn’t want help, just the application, which they stuck into their coats or pocketbooks or bags as if to say ‘You never saw me take this.’ At eleven a short, skinny, brown-haired woman sat across from me and told me in an educated, out-of-place voice about her brain tumor. She was taking an application in case she lived long enough for them to turn her electricity off. ‘Death brings odd comforts,’ she said. ‘All my life I worried about bills.’ I wanted to give her something, but all I had were blank applications and pencils. When she walked out the door I thought, Like Schroedinger’s cat, she’s dead now. She would see David before I would.

By one o’clock a line had formed outside. We had built up a rhythm and the day was going faster than when we were hooked up to the phone lines. I liked working with Cindy because she was rude and it made whoever I sat with nicer because they were happy they’d avoided her. She was also fast since she never explained anything twice or entertained rambling questions, so while I took my time talking with people, Cindy whittled down the line.

During a break between customers, Cindy complained that she needed a smoke. She wouldn’t go outside because she was afraid the white people would come out of their houses and hang her from the telephone lines like a pair of used Pumas. To torture her, I borrowed cigarettes from the carton Bill kept in the glove compartment. I stood by Cindy’s window, puffing up a fog and smiling within it as she gave me the finger. Sucking poison never felt so good. That kept me going until I saw some tattooed pink men in jeans and white undershirts coming down the road. Throwing my half-smoked cigarette down, I ran back on the bus and locked the door behind me as Cindy laughed at me.

The next day we went into West Philly. I tried to do the job right since it was my home, filled with my people. I walked to the meeting spot from my house, happy to get inside the bus before the dark clouds above could fulfill their promise. Out the window was: trash like nobody had invented cans; kids running and screaming while their book bags bounced on behind them; men without hope even at dawn waiting at day-labor lines trying to be asleep while standing in the cold; the smell of grease (food, hair, body); stores that had opened and closed and opened and closed until the titles on the marquees said nothing about the contents. Trolley tracks where there were no more trolleys, just broken and twisted metal embedded into the road. Occasional cobblestones appearing amid the asphalt as stone zits, sidewalks that buckled and cracked underneath the roots of dead trees, maroon broken-brick sand and the sharded glass of alcohol-escape sprinkled on the ground. Every surface covered in the fading graffiti of written screams. Wee-ha, my fucking home, my fucking people. Wee-ha, my fucking source, my own fucking kind. Everything I was, loved, and wanted to run away from.

I was polite but fast so we could help as many folks as possible, because by eight-thirty there was already a line. I wore a tie, hung from a shirt with a collar, so I let my accent shape my words so they would know I was one of them and not a part of the machine, so they would stop being so damn humble and polite to me, like I was an ofay. ‘Excuse me Mr Sir. Excuse me?’ No, fuck that, I’m here to help you. I am you. Spit on me as if I was yourself.

At ten I had my first voice-box in person. She had no teeth and she held the device to her neck like it was an electric razor and she was shaving her throat. I wanted to lift her onto my back and carry her somewhere. Her face was unwashed, and I could see the flaky white lines of tears and saliva on the midnight softness of her skin. So skinny, so small, and she listened, staring, to every word I said. Her face nodding between her wool hat and the faded scarves cloaking her neck and chin from the cold. Eyes that kept looking until they hurt, until it was, Mama, please turn away, Mama, please walk away and heal or die because whatever void is there I can’t hope to fill, whatever pain I am useless to erase.